Thursday, August 16, 2007

Blessing for a fantastic Mural

Our readers in Central Texas whose heads are still above water should try to check out the blessing of of the new mural at the Center for Health Care Services near Guadalupe and Zarzamora in San Antonio next week. It's a Saturday, August 25th from 10am to 12pm, so you can make it a day trip and go have a puffy taco afterwords.

This is San Anto Cultural Arts' 34th mural, one of many lovely ones they have put on West Side Walls. Our friend Adriana Garcia is one of the painters, and when we were in Texas for Lola's graduation we were lucky enough to get a preview of the mural in a warehouse on South Flores (rather than painting it directly on the brick wall, they are painting panels that will be attached to the building). Adriana and her collaborators did considerable research on the neurobiology of mental illness and spoke extensively to mentally ill individuals who use the Center. The result is a vivid, dreamlike painting that combines an exploration of the emotional trials of madness and recovery with otherworldy images of neurons.

It is, in other words, a socially engaged work of art by grown children of the Chicano movement that eschews the masculinist triumpalism that you see in some of the 1970s murals and aspires to an emotional depth that was foreign to earlier muralists. We'll post pictures as they are available. Too bad Jennifer, who presented thoughtfully at this past year's AAA meetings about post-Chicano visual art in the Rio Grande Valley is all the way out in Califas. We won't be there for the blessing, but we can't thank Adriana and her parents Pancho and Evelyn enough for taking us to the mural in May. We've got images from the mural tour up on flickr, in case you missed them.